Of Bondage and Foreign Actors
by nooziewoozie
Summary: Minato, for the umpteenth time since meeting and falling disastrously and hopelessly in love with Uzumaki Kushina, realizes that he Just Doesn’t Get It. --Kushina watches True Blood, and likes it. Rated for themes and implications. MinaKushi.


**Title:** Of Bondage and Foreign Actors  
**Characters:** MinaKushi. Mentions of Rin, Kakashi and Jiraiya  
**Rating:** T, for themes and, uh, implications.  
**Notes:** I have to stop writing fic and start doing things that will help ensure I get into med school in the next couple years, but here we have Minato's rumination on Kushina's attraction to the dashing and debonair Stephen Moyer from a vampire franchise that is vasty, vastly superior to _Twilight_, _True Blood_. _True Blood_ isn't heart-stoppingly amazing by any means, but it is loads of fun--violence, gore, interesting(ish) plots and characters, enough political and social allegories to keep me mildly interested, and lots of sex. (Though if all you little kiddies go and watch and are traumatized, don't blame it on me.) It helps if you have watched the first episode and know about Jason's shenanigans, but for those of you who don't, well, it's not that big of a deal--there is bondage and dirty language involved, is all. In any case, enjoy and remember to review!

* * *

Minato, for the umpteenth time since meeting and falling disastrously and hopelessly in love with Uzumaki Kushina, realizes that he Just Doesn't Get It.

"So," he asks slowly, because he wants to get this right, "this new show you've been gushing about has _vampires_ in it?"

Kushina nods absently, biting into an impossibly large chocolate chip cookie and flipping though _Konoha Today! _magazine. "Yes, that's right. Hey, the Daimyo's third daughter's pregnant! Again! And no one knows who the father is!" She snickers and bites another chunk off the cookie.

He lifts her swollen feet up and settles himself underneath them on the end of the couch she's decided to sprawl all over. "Hon," he says, "weren't you just ranting a month ago about how you couldn't stand vampires? Didn't you say that they were, ah, poisoning the youth or something?" He absently strokes the arches of her feet as he talks.

"Hm?" she hums, poring over the sexual shenanigans of the Fire Country nobility. All he can see is her forehead peeking out over the cover of the obnoxious magazine. "Oh, do that again, Minato, that thing with your thumb," she says, wiggling her left foot.

He sighs, obliging. "Kushina, love, you're not listening to me."

He feels more than sees her elaborate eye-roll as she snaps the tabloid closed and sets it on her still mostly flat abdomen. "This better be good," she says. "That article was hilarious."

He begins running firm fingers over her calves. "I thought you were ideologically opposed to vampires or something, love. Why the sudden change of heart?"

She smiles at him crookedly. "Oh is that all?"

He raises his eyebrows at her. "Darling, you know better than I do the sort of influence you wield over prepubescent little girls, and if you are planning on, I dunno, starting a riot or inciting a rebellion, I'd like to know beforehand."

She tries to glare at him, but his fingers are doing a wonderful job making her go languid against the fluffy throw-pillows she's arranged behind her. "Look at you, being all sarcastic and junk. Oh, Minato, do that _again, _and harder. Um, no, no, True Blood is different from those trashy novels."

"How so?"

"The main character has personality for one thing. She also spends most of her time yelling at the male lead, which is very amusing."

"And very true to life," he says, amused. "Are you identifying?"

"Something like that," she says. "_I_ don't speak with such a ridiculous accent, though. It's so obviously put-on, it's kind of grating. But whatever, it's still a good show. The characters are interesting, there's a serial killer on the loose, her brother is a moron. Good stuff." She flashes a mischievous smile at him. "It's also got enough sex to keep even Kakashi-kun interested."

He chuckles at her. "Really."

She rolls her eyes at him and pokes him in the ribs with an errant toe. "Yes, _really_. And besides, the male lead is ridiculously good looking." She giggles a bit at this, and Minato ears perk up. Never has Kushina _giggled_ at the mention of another male—laughed, commented snidely, and perhaps even appreciated with an open, honest air, but never _giggled_. "He's got the most ridiculous accent ever, and he follows all of these antiquated laws of chivalry. It's kind of adorable." She arches her back as his fingers hit a particularly sore spot on her right foot. "And he's chiseled, and oh lord, is he _built_. I'm still not sure if I'll ever get over how wonderful his cheekbones are. And you know what? I thought I would be grossed out by all the blood-sucking, but you know?" She smirks at him, eyes sparkling with deviousness, and Minato feels the bottom of his stomach fall out. "It's the hottest thing in the world when taken in context. His second sex scene with the female lead, god, I think I got shivers, he was that _amazing_ and that _intense_."

Minato clears his throat. "So you're, ah, going to keep up with this show?"

"Oh, don't worry about it. I'm not going to make you watch," she says nonchalantly, still smiling a little. "I'll just TiVo it and watch it while you're out or something." She nudges his elbow with an insistent foot. "A little more, please, your fingers are heavenly."

* * *

That evening, instead of working on the millions of little things he had to do, he has his intelligence team throw together a report on this…_actor_, this man who playes the vampire Bill Compton. Minato frowns as he studies the picture: the man, as far as is concerned, was nothing _overwhelmingly_ special, and _not_, he feels, at _all _worthy of all the praise Kushina had showered him with. He has sunken-in eyes, sunken-in cheeks, and a rather haughty tilt to his lips that Minato really finds distasteful.

Besides, he grouses while pouring over trade agreements, this Moyer character really isn't an issue—it is the outrageous amounts of imports Konoha is absorbing, everything from small stuffed toys to restaurant chains to TV shows that showcase vampires that captivate otherwise sane ninja women! It is nothing short of neo-colonialism—a siege on Konoha's culture, its values, its economic integrity! He scowls at Moyer—an _actor_, for crying out loud, who wouldn't even be able to hold a kunai correctly, let along charge one with chakra and send it flying into the dead center of a target in the middle of a raging battlefield, thank you very much—and drives a kunai right into the center of the picture.

"Right," he mutters. "Right. If they're going to colonize our airwaves, then we'll just return the favor. Damn vampires," and begins to draw up plans for a ninja TV show based on Icha Icha series and has already drafted a letter asking Jiraiya to come on board as screenwriter and director and is on the cusp of ordering Kakashi to play the ninja-vampire hybrid male lead, when Rin walks in. She takes one look at him, reads his plans, and laughs herself out of his office.

And at that point, Minato admits to himself that he Will Never Get It, resigns himself to this fact, and decides that he'd watch the damn show with Kushina and then make such explosive love to her in the aftermath that she'd forget all about built, chiseled and intense pretty boy actors.

* * *

"Really? _You_ want to watch it with me?" She cocks her head to the side and pins him with a quizzical glance. "You don't _like_ watching TV."

"Yes," he responds, "I don't like it, but I don't like not spending time with you more. Now that you're on leave and the baby isn't here yet, I figure I ought to monopolize your company while I can."

Her smile is brilliant, and without further preamble, she settles herself in the crook of his arm and props her fuzzy neon-green and orange sock-clad feet on the coffee table. "In that case," she says happily, shifting to leave a quick kiss on the side of his neck, "we have to watch from episode one!" She does something complicated with the remote and the TV blinks to life.

* * *

An hour later, Minato is staring at the screen and wondering what to make of the steady stream of blood, sex, violence and really bad accents that his brain has been fed.

"Isn't it great?" Kushina asks, shifting so she's half on top of him and smiling up into his eyes expectantly.

If he's honest with himself…"It is good, love," he says, running his left hand through her hair, "though some of it is just _really_ strange."

Her smile takes on a slightly sinister edge. "Like that bondage and video-tape scene? Don't bother to deny it, I felt you stiffening up." She pokes him in the ribs.

He catches her hands and gives the offending finger a quick kiss. "Yes, that one."

She just raises her eyebrows at him, and suddenly, he _knows_. She had _calculated_ the entire thing—the giggling, the praise, the shivers she had purportedly gotten from watching the sex scenes. All of it, so he'd watch the show with her and witness _that_ particular spectacle and tie her to the ceiling and—and—

He can't even complete the thought, let alone translate it into action.

"You—I—what—I'm not going to harness you to the rafters and say all those horrible things to you!" he sputters. "I can't—I mean, being kinky is one thing, and you _know_ that I'm willing to go through with most of the things you come up with, but _this_—"

She silences him with a finger across his lips. "Who says," she asks silkily, her voice low, "that _I_'d be the one tied up?"

He blinks at her, letting her words sink in and thinking through the implications.

"Oh," he says a moment later, "In that case..."

She laughs. "I knew you'd see it my way," she says, and that's all the warning he has before she pounces.


End file.
